Fifth Avenue eBook

hatfuls of diamonds, where the women were always discovered
in boudoirs with a French maid named Fanchette in
attendance, receiving bunches of long-stemmed roses
from potential correspondents, while the men, all
very tall and dark, possessed of interesting pasts,
were introduced before fireplaces in sumptuous bachelor
apartments, the veins knotted on their temples, and
their strong yet aristocratic fingers clutching a
photograph or a scented note.”

Gonfarone’s, the “Benedetto’s”
of the tale, is an old, converted dwelling house.
There are the brown-stone steps, flanked by a pair
of iron lanterns, giving entrance to a narrow corridor;
and, beyond, to the right, the dining room, extending
through the house, linoleum underfoot, hat-racks and
buffets of oak aligned against the brownish walls,
and, everywhere, little tables, each covered with
a scanty cloth, set close together. In the days
when Felix Piers was in the habit of patronizing the
place there floated to his ears such phrases as “bad
colour scheme!” “sophomoric treatment!”
“miserable drawing!” “no atmosphere!”
But all that was years ago. When the writer dined
there last, a month or so back, fragments of conversation
caught from the clatter of the tongues of the Bohemians
were: “Take it from me, kid!” “If
old man Weinstein thinks he can put that over, he’s
got another guess coming!” “And then I
give her the juice and we lost that super-six in the
dust!” “Yes, Huggins has got some
infield!”

Fifteen or twenty years ago the trail of Bohemia would
have inevitably led to Maria’s in West Twelfth
Street. For there to be found, among others,
was a certain Mickey Finn, as celebrated in his day
and town as Aristide Bruant was in a section of Paris
of the nineties. About Finn gathered a group
of newspaper men and journalists. The distinction
was that the newspaper man was one who earned his
daily bread on Park Row, while the journalist had
written a sketch for the New York “Sun”
in 1878, and still carried and proudly exhibited the
clipping. The original Maria, a large Italian
cook who presided autocratically over the kitchen
of the basement restaurant, long since migrated somewhere
to the north. She had exacted her share of the
homage and the substance of her clients. After
her departure there was still the attempt to keep up
the ancient fire of witticism, and “la la la
la!” was still uttered in what was thought to
be the best Parisian accent, and the judgments of
magazine editors, and the achievements of the painters
who sold their portraits, and the writers whose novels
crept into the lists of the “six bestsellers”
continued to be damned in no uncertain tones.
But the old spirit seems irrevocably gone.

CHAPTER XI

The Slope of Murray Hill

Stretches of the Avenue—­Murray Hill:
a Slope in Transition—­Early Astor Land
Purchases—­The Brunswick Building—­A
Deserted Clubland—­Churches of the Stretch—­The
Marble Collegiate—­The “Little Church
Around the Corner” and its Story—­When
Grant’s Funeral Procession Passed—­The
Waldorf and the Astoria—­On the Hill in 1776—­When
the Red-Coats Loitered.